It's a cr*pshoot, exercise estimating, in a lot of ways. Just for fun, if you do a variety of things of different types and intensities, it's possible (not guaranteed) that your tracker will be over on some estimates, under on others, end up pretty close on the overall total. Some trackers 'learn' some things about your fitness level, but it's not perfect. Fitness level differences between people can also cause distortion of heart-rate-based calorie estimates. On top of that, most trackers use age estimates of your maximum heart rate, and those HRmax estimates are inaccurate enough for a large minority of the population that that can throw off the calorie estimates, too. Again, some trackers don't exclusively use heart rate alone to estimate all types of cardio these days, but I don't know about Apple. Estimates based on heart rate can be somewhat close for moderate steady state cardio, are more likely to be wrong for intervals (especially high intensity intervals), high intensity steady state or quite low intensity steady state cardio.

(Not all trackers use heart rate to do that these days, I'm not sure about Apple.)ĭoes that mean it's accurate for cardio? No, not necessarily. Depending on what Apple includes in the move calories, you may not be able to add all of the move calories from the watch as your exercise activity.īanx is right, if a fitness tracker uses heart rate to estimate strength training calories, it can be quite far Keep in mind that your base MFP calorie goal includes some movement calories in its estimate (how much depends on your activity level setting). I'm not being snarky when I say this: You know the watch is accurate for you on average, in context of your personal food logging practices, when you follow it the watch's estimates for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual periods, for women) and observe that your body weight behaves as expected given your logged calories.

Myfitnesspal and apple watch